Visualization of 600 trains from the four Metros to the rest of India. Created by Rasagy Sharma using d3.js
“Visualizing Trains from Metros in India”
Brief: “Experience how one of the largest railway networks in the world connects the four major metros to the rest of the nation.”
Short description: Using a small open data set — as well as an interactive medium — provide a visually rich experience of the connections built by the massive Indian railways network. In the process of doing so, not only highlight the vast coverage of the system, but also bring to attention potential areas for expansion, while emphasizing on the skewed form of the country being formed by mass migration to metros.
Full Description: The aim of the project was to visualize India as connected by the railways network, which was the primary mode of inter-city transport for most Indians before flights became economical & long car drives became a leisure activity. In recent years, there’s been a constant shift of people from villages and smaller towns to major cities. This distress migration to the urban India means a large part of the country is being forgotten & slowly getting disconnected from the rest of us. The project thus reminds one through these rail routes, the connections that still exist and the areas no longer in direct connection with major cities. Focusing on the four metros — Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata — the visualization reverses this migration by highlighting routes from the metros to the rest of the country.
The visualization starts by mapping short train routes that begin from these metros and end at the nearby cities & towns. What begins as four discrete clusters of lines & dots slowly starts to merge into one cohesive network, as longer train routes animate in. By the time the longest route starting from a metro — Delhi to Kanyakumari — fades in, a skewed image of India emerges, not comprised of states and boundaries but an expression of how connected — or disconnected — the nation is. With each route highlighted with a translucent line, some routes appear darker to show more number of train routes, and some dots stand out more representing cities that are better connected to these four metros. The observer can now interact with the visualization, exploring which route each line represents.
The final form lets the observer make his/her own conclusions about which parts of the country are still not connected directly with the metros, and whether to applaud or criticise the extent of the Indian Railway network.
Technical Details: This project was initiated during a weekend workshop by S Anand (Gramener) on Data Visualization. The original dataset provided roughly 5000+ train routes (with train types, start & end station names, distance etc.) of which 600 train routes were filtered that began from one of the four metros. The train stations were then geocoded using Excel Macros and Google Maps API. Instead of mapping them on a map, a cartogram approach was used to plot them on a cartesian plane with the same ratio as the map of India. Initial tests were done in Excel using a smaller data set, and the final output was created using D3.js — a Javascript library for creating interactive visualizations.
The project was created by Rasagy Sharma, with the help of Babuma R (NID Bangalore) and mentorship of S Anand & Venkatesh Rajamanickam (IDC, IIT Bombay).